The Summer Without Men
About this ebook
'An astoundingly joyful read . . . a book that shines with intellectual curiosity and emotional integrity' Guardian
'By turns funny, moving and erudite, playfully reminding us of a contemporary Jane Austen' Daily Mail
After Mia Fredricksen's husband of thirty years asks for a pause - so he can indulge his infatuation with a young French colleague - she cracks up (briefly), rages (deeply), then decamps to her prairie childhood home.
There, gradually, she is drawn into the lives of those around her: her mother's circle of feisty widows; the young woman next door; and the diabolical teenage girls in her poetry class. By the end of the summer without men, Mia knows what's worth fighting for - and on whose terms.
Provocative, mordant, and fiercely intelligent, this is a gloriously vivacious tragi-comedy about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old war between the sexes.
A rich and intelligent meditation on female identity, written in beguiling lyrical prose . . . heady and intoxicating' Sunday Times
PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT:
'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie
'One of our finest novelists' Oliver Sacks
'Reading a Hustvedt novel is like consuming the best of David Lynch' Financial Times
'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels including the international bestseller What I Loved, The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Memories of the Future, as well as five collections of essays: Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros, Living, Thinking, Looking and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. She has also published a poetry collection, Reading To You, and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.
Hustvedt has won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the European Essay Prize for her essay The Delusions of Certainty. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn, New York.
